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T H E U N C E R T A I N F U T U R E S
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No. 36 · Friday, 31 July 2026Welcome in. OpenAI cut the price of two GPT-5.6 models by up to 80% and credited one of its own models with finding the savings. Amazon's cloud grew at its fastest pace in more than four years while the capital budget went up again, and Apple turned in its best June quarter ever and watched the shares fall anyway. Brussels, meanwhile, opened bidding for up to seven AI gigafactories worth more than €30 billion.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░OpenAI cuts two model prices by up to 80%, after one of its models rewrote the code that serves them (update)
From Thursday, GPT-5.6 Luna costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output, an 80% cut, and the mid-tier Terra falls 20% to $2 and $12. Sol, the top of the range, stays at $5 and $30. On OpenAI's own account the savings came from efficiency work that included Sol autonomously rewriting the production GPU kernels (the low-level code that runs a model on the chip); OpenAI credits that kernel work with cutting end-to-end serving costs by 20% (OpenAI · CNBC · VentureBeat).
Amazon's cloud grows 37%, and the capital budget goes up again on the price of memory
Second-quarter revenue reached $200.6 billion, up 20%, with AWS at $42.2 billion and growth of 37%, its fastest in eighteen quarters. Free cash flow over the trailing twelve months swung to an outflow of $7.6 billion from an inflow of $18.2 billion a year earlier, and Andy Jassy lifted the 2026 capital-spending plan to $220 billion, attributing part of the increase to higher memory prices. Shares rose more than 8% after hours, which is not how investors treated Google's near-identical arithmetic last week. Jassy's counter-argument was unusually specific: AWS is already booking capacity for 2028, servers break even in under three years, and the equipment lasts five to six years (CNBC · CNBC · Amazon · GeekWire).
Apple posts its best June quarter ever and drops 6% on a chip shortage it cannot outspend
Revenue rose 16% to $109.4 billion, earnings per share 29% to $2.02, iPhone revenue 22% to $54.3 billion and Mac 29%, with June-quarter records across the board. Then the guidance landed: 9% to 11% growth for the September quarter against analyst expectations above 12%, held back by an industry-wide shortage of the advanced chipmaking capacity Apple's own silicon requires. Services grew 12% to $30.7 billion, a record that still missed forecasts, and the shares fell about 6% after hours. It was Tim Cook's last earnings call as chief executive, and the constraint he handed John Ternus is one no amount of cash resolves (Apple · CNBC · Bloomberg).
Google guarantees Anthropic's leases so that banks will lend $15 billion for a Texas campus
A Morgan Stanley-led consortium is in advanced talks to lend about $15 billion, structured as a $14 billion bridge loan plus a revolving facility, to Nexus Data Centers for a campus at Hubbard, Texas, with a 1.6-gigawatt gas plant on site. Google is putting its investment-grade credit behind four Anthropic data-center leases and the related power purchase agreements, and takes roughly 20% of the equity in the data-center and power project in return. Anthropic will run Google TPUs there, co-designed with Broadcom, whose chips come with their own vendor financing. A lab that has never turned a profit is being underwritten, lease by lease, by the cloud provider it rents from (CNBC · Bloomberg).
Brussels opens bidding for seven AI gigafactories and puts €10 billion of public money behind them
The European Commission launched its call for tenders on Thursday for up to seven AI Gigafactories, computing sites meant to let European start-ups, universities and public bodies train and fine-tune frontier models without renting American capacity. Up to €10 billion of EU and national money is supposed to pull in at least €20 billion of private investment, for more than €30 billion in total. Bids close on 12 November, selection follows in early 2027, and the winners then have eighteen months to switch anything on. Set against Amazon's $220 billion of capital spending this year alone, the number is a statement of intent rather than a challenge (European Commission · Digital Strategy · Euronews).
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ EARNINGS ▓▓▒▒░░The megacap half of the season closed on Thursday night, and the grading has not moved off cash flow. Amazon and Apple both reported after the US close; both are covered above.
Super Micro pre-announced on July 21 revenue near the low end of its range, gross margins roughly double what it guided, and more than $60 billion of new orders in the quarter; the call is where those three get reconciled (Palantir · AMD · Supermicro).
░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░Zuckerberg argues for acceleration while his own chief scientist signs the letter asking for brakes (update). In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg argued that the United States should speed AI development up rather than restrict it, and that the real danger is superintelligence ending up held by a handful of institutions; he made the same case against banning Chinese open-weight models to the Financial Times. Among the more than 1,300 signatures on the Pacing the Frontier letter published the same day is Shengjia Zhao, Meta's chief AI scientist. The split now runs inside the companies as much as between them (The Hill · Wall Street Journal · Pacing the Frontier).
OpenAI hands its rogue-agent post-mortem to outside evaluators (update). The company says it is working with the AI-safety evaluation groups METR and Redwood Research on a third-party assessment of how its models behaved during the Hugging Face intrusion, which will feed its own technical report, and that the unreleased model involved has been deactivated, encrypted and restricted from research access. Hugging Face's forensic timeline counts roughly 17,600 actions by the agent, and makes the point that the volume itself was the defense problem: the one successful path sat inside thousands of failed ones. Reconstructing it by hand proved impractical (OpenAI · Hugging Face).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░Security researchers found ways to make Microsoft's Copilot hand over customer files. The Information reports that vulnerabilities discovered earlier this year in the Copilot features built into Microsoft 365 could have let an attacker trick the assistant into leaking any file or email in a customer's tenant, triggered by malicious code inside an ordinary Word document. One flaw, reported by the security firm Rubrik in April and since patched, worked because Copilot's walled-off code-testing sandbox could reach the internet after all; Rubrik says the attack would have worked against any Copilot corporate tenant, and would not have looked unusual in the logs (The Information).
Google says AI helped Chrome fix more bugs in two releases than in the previous two years. The two Chrome versions shipped in June fixed 1,072 security bugs, against 1,036 across the previous 23 versions. Chrome engineering director Doug Turner told TechCrunch that models such as Gemini are now used to find flaws, triage reports, write patches and review code, and that this has changed the economics of the work. That 1,036 was two years of work (TechCrunch · BleepingComputer).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░Washington's robot import ban also covers the vacuum cleaner (update). The FCC import ban we covered on Wednesday was written around humanoids and robot dogs, but the agency has confirmed it sweeps in robot vacuums, and robotic lawn mowers are expected to fall under it too. Machines already approved can still be sold and imported, and existing ones keep working; new foreign-made models cannot enter. Almost no robot vacuum is manufactured in the United States, so what matters is not the brand on the box but the country it was assembled in (Straight Arrow News · Notebookcheck).
Pornhub writes to more than 300 state officials to tell them their age-verification laws do not work. The letter went out on Tuesday to lawmakers, governors and attorneys general, arguing that checking age at each individual website pushes users toward sites that comply with nothing, and that the check belongs at the device or operating-system level instead. The company has blocked most access in 25 states and three countries rather than build the gate, and Alex Kekesi of parent company Aylo says the withdrawal is the point rather than a side effect. It is a self-interested argument from an adult-video company, and it is also the argument California's device-level law is built on (Politico Pro · Union-Bulletin).
░░▒▒▓▓ INFRA ▓▓▒▒░░DeepSeek is building a gigawatt of its own compute in Inner Mongolia. The Chinese lab plans a data center at Ulanqab, about 350 kilometers northwest of Beijing, with partial operation expected in late 2027 or early 2028, and will lease further capacity elsewhere. The site selects itself on physics: Ulanqab averages 4 degrees Celsius across the year, which takes a large bite out of the cooling bill. It is also the first time DeepSeek has built rather than rented at this scale (Bloomberg · Investing.com).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░A hedge fund called Situational Awareness was margin-called out of the AI trade. Leopold Aschenbrenner, the former OpenAI researcher, sold his fund's entire public equity book to Ken Griffin's Citadel on Thursday after margin calls from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Bank of America, ending a run that had returned more than 1,000% since inception. Roughly four times leverage turned this month's selloff in memory, power and AI-cloud names, among them SK Hynix, Sandisk, Bloom Energy and Nebius, into a forced liquidation; assets are down to about $10 billion from as much as $45 billion. What survives is a private vehicle holding a roughly $5 billion stake in Anthropic, which is to say the position nobody has to mark every afternoon (CNBC · Bloomberg · TechCrunch).
Nscale buys Anyscale for about $1.65 billion while lining up its own listing. The Nvidia-backed British cloud provider is adding the software layer that machine-learning teams use to spread training and inference across thousands of GPUs, bringing roughly 200 staff with it and closing in the second half of the year. Nscale has hired Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan to prepare an initial public offering reported to be targeted for the second half of the year; it carried a $14.6 billion valuation in March, and shares in CoreWeave, the listed American AI cloud provider, have fallen about 25% in a month. It is the CoreWeave playbook, run in the month CoreWeave's own shares fell (Nscale · Bloomberg · TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░Hamas confirms Trump's disarmament agreement, and ties every step to an Israeli withdrawal. The US president said late on Thursday that his Board of Peace, the body overseeing the Gaza settlement, had reached an agreement on the complete disarmament of Hamas, with weapons to be stored under a committee the board establishes and a detailed roadmap to be drawn up within fourteen days. Hamas negotiators have been in Cairo since late last week with Egyptian, Qatari and Turkish mediators. CNN reported on Thursday evening that Hamas had not yet responded; by Friday morning Ghazi Hamad of the Hamas negotiating delegation had confirmed the deal, saying disarmament depends on Israel withdrawing from Gaza and on progress on reconstruction (Al Jazeera · CNN).
Spain sends the army to Ceuta after thousands cross from Morocco. Between 1,500 and 2,000 people have entered the Spanish enclave in the past ten days, with hundreds more arriving on Thursday. Authorities put the toll at eighteen or more; a representative of a local Civil Guard officers' association said many drowned and others were killed in a crush at the Tarajal breakwater fence. Ceuta's regional president declared a humanitarian and social emergency and asked Madrid for troops, and the government said on Thursday evening it would deploy the armed forces alongside the Civil Guard, while the interior ministry declined to declare a national emergency (Al Jazeera · France 24).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░Zurich buys Chinese electric buses whose maker has had to promise they cannot be driven remotely. The city executive approved about CHF 17 million on Wednesday for twenty vehicles, eight standard electric buses from Yutong and twelve articulated ones from Daimler Buses Schweiz, entering service from mid-2027. Norwegian cybersecurity tests found that remote access to Yutong buses was possible in principle; the manufacturer's answer is that its internet-connected software is not wired to the brakes or the steering. The transport operator went shopping in the first place because its existing European electric fleet arrived late and with faults in the heating and ventilation, the drivetrain and the automatic pantographs (NZZ · Stadt Zürich).
BMW's workforce will shrink by about 8,000 by the end of 2027, with the German back office carrying the cuts. On Wednesday the carmaker said it had agreed to a voluntary severance program with its works council covering administration and development, with production excluded. Around 40,000 of its roughly 84,000 permanent German staff will receive offers from October 2026. Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz have already negotiated cuts running into the tens of thousands, which makes this less a BMW story than a running total (CNBC · RTÉ).
░░▒▒▓▓ ROBOTICS ▓▓▒▒░░Zoox wins the first US clearance to charge for rides in a car with no steering wheel. Federal regulators granted Amazon's robotaxi unit a temporary exemption on Thursday from eight motor vehicle safety standards, capped at 2,500 vehicles a year for two years, and paid service begins in Las Vegas next month. Zoox has been giving free rides in San Francisco and Las Vegas since it had no way to bill for them. The cap gives regulators a defined window to watch a commercial fleet before they write anything permanent (TechCrunch · NHTSA · CNBC).
Google DeepMind releases three robotics models, one of them able to direct other robots. Gemini Robotics 2, out on Thursday, controls a humanoid's whole body rather than just its arms; Gemini Robotics ER 2 handles planning, real-time progress monitoring and collaboration between machines of different types, and is available in Google AI Studio; Gemini Robotics On-Device 2 runs on a robot's own computer and can be adapted to new hardware in a few hours. DeepMind's headline result is a 92% success rate at unscrewing a light bulb (Google DeepMind · SiliconANGLE).
░░▒▒▓▓ PAPERS ▓▓▒▒░░arXiv preprint — a keyword formula from the 1990s beats the fashionable retrieval architectures at scale. Posted on Wednesday, the study builds a ladder of 28 nested document collections, growing from about 1,000 to 512,000 documents while the questions stay fixed, and runs four styles of retrieval-augmented generation over each. RAG is the practice of handing a model documents at query time instead of relying on what it memorized; BM25 is a plain keyword ranking formula that predates all of it. BM25 defines the cheap end of the accuracy-versus-cost frontier at every tier and leads on accuracy from mid-scale upward, with no model-generated index to build. A file-system agent matches it on tiny collections, then uses 39 times more query tokens and finishes nearly 20 points behind at full size; graph-based RAG burns up to 24.6 generated tokens per indexed token, and the heaviest graph builders stall inside the first 2% of the corpus while the scalable variants reach about a quarter of it and still score below BM25. This is a preprint, not peer-reviewed work, but anyone being sold a graph-RAG deployment now has a number to ask about (arXiv).
Amazon Science — a health chatbot can pass for competent and still leave out the crisis hotline. PatientAgentBench, published on Wednesday, generates a synthetic patient record, a clinical vignette drawn from it, and a simulated patient who then talks to the AI system under test; a jury of language models scores the exchange against more than a hundred clinician-vetted criteria across clinical safety, triage quality, workflow accuracy, task completion, helpfulness and conversational quality. The recurring failures are the ones a press release never mentions: omitting crisis resources in an emergency, and claiming to have taken actions that were never executed. More capable models narrowed those gaps without closing them. Amazon built the benchmark, and it is still a clinician-validated yardstick for patient-facing health AI in sustained, tool-using conversation (Amazon Science).
░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░LinkedIn added a report option to every post on Thursday, tucked into the three-dot menu and labeled Seems like AI slop, and authors whose posts get flagged are told privately in their analytics dashboard. In the same release the platform retired its own Enhance your post AI writer and replaced it with a proofreading tool meant to preserve the writer's voice. Takeaway: the machine that generated the slop and the button that reports it now ship from the same company, and the reputational cost has moved from the post to the poster. There is still no way to test a post before you publish it, because the release added no composer warning and no score. The classifier is the part with teeth: LinkedIn says it correctly identifies generic content 94% of the time in initial testing, and content it judges generic travels less far beyond your own network. If your executives publish on LinkedIn, this is the week to check who is drafting their posts, and to write to the company's own standard rather than to a format: perspective, context or expertise, not the polished restatement that adds nothing (TechCrunch · 404 Media · LinkedIn).
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░Shift, a division of the German startup Microagi, sent a private chef to WIRED writer Reece Rogers's apartment to cook him lunch, on one condition: the chef wore a camera and filmed every chop, stir and pan-shuffle as training data for future humanoids. Rogers got a free meal. The company got several hours of expert hand motion that no simulator can currently fake, which at present market rates for robot demonstration data is the better end of the trade. Somewhere a model is learning to season aggressively (WIRED).
░░▒▒▓▓ IN MEMORIAM ▓▓▒▒░░Kavinsky, born Vincent Belorgey, was found dead at his home in Paris on Tuesday. He was 50. The Paris prosecutor's office confirmed the death and has opened an inquiry; no cause has been established, and first responders reported nothing suspicious at the scene. He spent a career on one idea, a synthesizer figure that sounds like a car at night. Tributes came from Macron, Jean-Michel Jarre and David Guetta. Today's track is the one you already know (BBC · Rolling Stone).
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░Nightcall — the Uncertain Futures desk